• 21
  • December
    2010

Victoria Brignell, a disabled journalist writing about disability in a column on the New Statesman, writes, "While British and American disabled people still suffer discrimination, poverty and lack of opportunities, there is no doubt they are now able to participate in society to a degree that previous generations could only have dreamed about."

A large part of this participation is a disabled person's ability to make ends meet through a social safety net - Social Security Disability benefits, for example - and even those with depression and affective disorders and anxiety-related disorders (who would have been dismissed in the past) have access to benefits.

But prior to stating that Brignell herself feels fortunate to be living as a disabled person in the early 21st century, she first describes a long and brutal history of segregation and maltreatment of disabled people over the last couple hundred years. It's quite difficult to read.

Money and Disability

Brignell, who in her columns examines both her own life as a disabled woman as well as the broader disability rights movement, clearly feels fortunate: "The greatest benefit of becoming tetraplegic is that it's made me realise what's important in life." She goes on to write about a "comfortable flat, a rewarding job and enough money to meet all my needs."

In the past, those without the ability to live independently - generally without money and sufficient familial resources - were segregated in institutions. Most of these institutions were extremely abusive.

Brignell writes of children, lacking enough food, eating toothpaste and grass. She writes of medical experimentation, such as a child born with deformed hands and feet undergoing repeated and painful corrective surgeries ("torture"), which apparently did nothing to correct his condition. She writes of the absence of control, the absence of choice, and the absence of basic human dignity.

As Social Security Disability lawyers, we understand that money (or lack of money, to be precise) and those particular living conditions in which a disabled person finds herself are inextricably linked.

Money buys food. It buys housing. It buys help.

Sources: When the disabled were segregated

Farewell: the final Crip's Column